Bit.ly

August 28, 2009

There are hundreds of tools out there for accessing and managing your twitter account.

I've tried many, but find myself coming back to the same handful of tools which I use repeatedly.

With twitter, I'm firmly convinced that we have a plethora of tools because different people approach twitter in different ways for different purposes - so no two tweeple will necessarily use the exact same tools.

However, I always find it useful to learn from the experience of others. So with that in mind, here are my [current] top 10 free twitter tools (in no particular order):

1. http://www.twellow.com. Want to build up your social network? This site acts like a yellow-pages for social media folks and allows you to provide links to many other social networks where you spend your time.

2. http://wefollow.com/. This is another directory, specifically for twitterfolk, which allows users to register their profiles under whatever categories they choose. This site seems to pull updates more frequently than twellow, but both are good.

3. http://search.twitter.com/. The original search engine for twitter. While searches are integrated with everyone's twitter account (and you can save specialized searches to your twitter account), I find I continue to go back to this site to run additional searches.

This is a great little tool which continues to be updated with your needs in mind - but would be perfect if they allowed data downloads. Right now you have to mouseover the timeline to get your results.

5. http://tweetake.com/. Talk about data downloads - this tool's only purpose is to download your twitter data in the event twitter crashed and you needed to reconstitute your account. Download lists of your followers, friends, recent tweets, recent favorites. Another tool I've used to view my twitter connections is http://lessfriends.com/ though their site includes a disclaimer indicating that the data may not be accurate (missing followers).

Also, note that tweeple follow and unfollow all the time. So what you download today will be different tomorrow. That's one of the problems with trying to "manage" your followers. They are never the same. I find it is best to monitor the conversation and save important mentions or exchanges about you in your favorites folder. After a while you will get a good sense of who your best advocates are.

6. http://backtweets.com/. Need to find out who is tweeting about your content? You can search for your profile name, you can search for your name in twitter search. But what about those times when people link to content without naming names? With backtweets, simply type in any URL and you will find everyone who is linking to that URL from twitter, regardless of what URL shortener they use.

7. http://twitalyzer.com/. Are you a good twitterer? Twitalyzer can help you decide. It is a unique tool - created by @erictpeterson - that evaluates the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

8. http://www.danieldura.com/code/twittercamp. This is a cool tool that I anticipate will become a standard at conferences in the future. It displays tweets based on username, keyword or hashtag - so everyone can see what tweeting participants are tweeting about during the conference!

NOTE: This does take some work to rebrand for your purposes, but once you've got things set-up, you can easily load your configuration into twittercamp each time you use it.

9. http://twitterfeed.com/. This tool allows you to supplement your twitter account through use of RSS feeds that pull content from your website or other social media tools. I avoided this tool for a long time because I felt there was something disingenous about automated postings to twitter. I changed my mind when I realized my personal twitter profile (@lauraleedooley) was suffering from lack of updates because I focused primarily on my organization's profile (@worldresources). Knowing that my personal brand is as important to WRI as the organization's brand AND knowing that I spend a lot of posting content on facebook, delicious, digg, stumbleupon, youtube and other social networks that was relevant to both WRI and my personal profile, I took the plunge. Lesson learned: It is okay to use twitterfeed judiciously to supplement your tweets - but don't rely on it exclusively. You need to continue to monitor your twitter profile regularly and actively participate in relevant online conversations.

http://www.twitpic.com. I love the fact that this interfaces your cell phone snapshots with twitter - while facebook mobile offers the same service, having the public posting of your photos is very useful in reaching a broader audience.

This is great if you are on vacation or a trip away from family and friends and you want to provide photo updates.

Twitter RSS feeds - favorites (http://twitter.com/favorites/profilename.rss) - I can't tell you how useful it has been to track my twitter favorites -- which I use as a holding place for all mentions, conversations with, and tweets about me -- by pulling the RSS feed into my Google Reader. Here I can also download a copy of the tweets to an excel spreadsheet and analyze who is tweeting about me on a regular basis.

http://wthashtag.com. What are the most popular hashtags? What hashtag(s) should you use to label your tweet? This tool hopes to provide the resources for you to make an informed decision - and to find out how the hashtags you regularly use or follow are performing on twitter. Besides providing statistics, it also provide a useful API and blog. You need to register to really use all the features of this site, but it is definitely worth it!

It would be remiss of me not to emphasize that the tools I use now may not be the same tools I use next month or next year. Already we are seeing an integration of tools (facebook page feeds to twitter) and the demise of others (such as tr.im which is shutting down at the end of the 2009).

But I will keep monitoring these tools and bookmarking them on my delicious account - so if you find you want to check out some of the other tools out there, feel free to visit my always expanding list of twitter tools at http://delicious.com/lldoolj2/twitter+tools.

A word about Tweetdeck

Oh, and yes I've tried http://www.tweetdeck.com and other desktop clients. As someone who is spending most of her time living in the cloud, desktop clients are interesting, but not the direction I choose to go at this point.

For example - a while ago, I moved from bookmarking websites in my browser (a desktop client) to bookmarking them exclusively on delicious.com. This way I could access my bookmarks from any browser on any computer at any time. I was just tired of having no access to my bookmarks when I was used a different computer or browser.

Because Tweetdeck is a desktop client, any configuration I make on my desktop doesn't always translate to other computers or clients. Also, I have to say when I tested it out on my computer, I discovered many missing friends which made me a bit wary of the usefulness of the tool (but that was several months ago - the tool may have improved).

Bottom line - I prefer to manage my twitter, facebook, linkedin and other accounts from any computer, browser, client, etc. That way I spend less time focused on the hardware and software and more time focused on the content. And I achieve gains in efficiency and productivity.

However, Tweetdeck is hands down the most popular of the desktop clients, so I encourage you to try it and determine if it is useful in helping you to manage your twitter account.

June 02, 2009

In pulling together some data on twitter clickthroughs, there was a noticeable discrepancy between bit.ly and google analytics data - bit.ly clicks are noticeably higher than traffic source numbers for twitter on Google Analytics. Two caveats:

1. Bit.ly data collected reflects all bit.ly links including those initially posted by @worldresources using the Google Analytics Campaign Code - accounting for an average of 60% of the clicks - as well as those generated by others.

2. I pulled all information by keyword "twitter" from the Google Analytics account - which brings over all pageviews sources coming from twitter and the GA Campaign Code links posted by @worldresources.

But in closer inspection, I noticed that the Bit.ly clicks and Google pageviews data lines - despite being vastly different in terms of numbers - were almost identical in terms of trends.

I did some research on this and here is a list of potential reasons for this -

No two analytics tools measure data the same way - there will always be discrepancies between analytics tools. With bit.ly we are measuring clicks but with google analytics, we are measuring pageviews which may be captured differently.

Google Analytics may be combining multiple clickthroughs by the same twitter/user account as one whereas bit.ly counts clicks and not users

One prevalent theory is that bit.ly numbers are higher because bit.ly data includes bots and automated traffic whereas Google Analytics will not capture those visits (in GA count is computed using Javascript, which bots do not execute).

So while some of the referrers may be bots, because twitter feeds are disseminated throughout the web and desktop clients, not all of the clicks are going through twitter. Aha! Note that as of March 2009, bit.ly screened out HEAD requests from click results.

Another theory is that Google Analytics does not count clicks from twitter.com as uniques -- and that's one reason google counts are lower than bit.ly. It isn't clear how traffic from twitter clients looks to GA, but this may account for overall lower count rates on GA.

Not all bit.ly clicks are coming from WRI-generated links, and these charts only includes bit.ly data - it doesn't include click on links using full WRI URLs OR other URL shorteners like is.gd, tr.im, cli.gs, tinyurl.com, twurl.com. I haven't determined how to capture that additional data efficiently - I'm still trying to get my mind around the bit.ly/google data.

Regardless of which numbers you ultimately decide to highlight (Google Analytics Traffic or Bit.ly Clicks), you should track twitter links in Google by including the Google UTM campaign code as part of the link - see the EpikOne post Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track by Justin Cutroni.